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‘Poor Protestant Flies’: Conversions to Catholicism in Early Eighteenth Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Eamon Duffy
Eamon Duffy*
Affiliation:
University of LondonKing's College
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Extract

Through the stormy and divided history of religion in seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England runs one constant and unvarying stream—hatred and fear of popery. That ‘gross and cruel superstition’ haunted the protestant imagination. The murderous paranoia of the popish plot was the last occasion on which catholic blood was spilled in the service of the national obsession, but the need to preserve ‘our Country from Papal Tyranny; our Laws, our Estates, our Liberties from Papal Invasion; our Lives from Papal Persecution; and our Souls from Papal Superstition . . .’ continued to exercise men of every shade of churchmanship, and of none. Throughout the early eighteenth century zealous churchmen sought to keep alive ‘the Spirit of Aversion to Popery whereby the Protestant Religion hath been chiefly supported among us’, and publications poured from the press reminding men of the barbarities of the papists, ancient and modern, the fires of Smithfield and the headman’s axe of Thorn. Catholicism was bloody, tyrannical, enslaving, and cant phrases rolled pat from tongue and pen—popery and arbitrary government, popery and wooden shoes. The tradition was universal, as integral a part of the nation’s self-awareness as beer and roast-beef, and equally above reason. There were, observed Daniel Defoe, ‘ten thousand stout fellows that would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 15: Religious Motivation Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian , 1978 , pp. 289 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1978

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References

1 Clifton, Robin, ‘Fear of Popery’, The Origins of the English Civil War, ed Russell, Conrad (London 1973) pp 144-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, [John], Politics and Popery [in England 1660-1688] (Cambridge 1973) pp 67–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kenyon, [J. P.], [The Popish] Plot (Penguin ed 1974) PP 1–5 Google Scholar.

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4 Quoted in George, M.Dorothy, London Life in the Eighteenth century (Penguin ed 1966) P 125 Google Scholar.

5 Lowe], [Solomon, Tlie Protestant Family Piece[; or a Picture of Popery] (London 1716) p xvii Google Scholar; Kenyon, Plot p 1; The Old Whig: or, the Consistent Protestant (London 1739) 1 p 6.

6 Miller, Politics and Popery pp 239-63; the statistics of catholic publications dramatically illustrate this—figures from Clancy, T. H., English Catholic Books 1641-1700 (Loyola University Press, Chicago 1974) p xvi Google Scholar.

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8 Archbishop Herring of York, quoted in CRS 32 pp 381-8. Examples of reports of conversions, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Hartshorne MSS 3 fol 137 Benjamin Marshal to J. Postlethwayt 18 April 1708; E[ssex R[ecusant] 17 (London 1975) pp 35-8 Revd Alexander Jephson to bishop Edmund Gibson n September 1723.

8 Wake Papers Epist 21/65 bishop Chandler to William Wake 2 December 1718; Ibid 21/233 same to same 21 May 1720; further examples in E. Duffy ‘Over the Wall, [Converts from Popery in Eighteenth century England’], DR 94 (1976) pp 2-3.

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11 SPCK Papers and Memorials 1715-1725 fols 133-5.

12 A[rchives of the] A[rchbishop of] Westminster], Ep[istolae] Var[iorum] 6 no 55, Bonaventura Giffard to Laurence Mayes 5 August 1717; 6 no 117 10 July 1719 same to same 10 July 1719 (printed with minor inaccuracies and omissions in Hemphill, Basil, The Early Vicars Apostolic (London 1954) pp 48–9 Google Scholar; ‘A’ Series 40 no 3 bishops Stonor and Petre to Propaganda 25 November 1734 (this appears to be the Latin letter summarised in Edwin Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (London 1909) 1 pp 79-80, but there wrongly dated 1737); [The] Present State of Popery [in England] (London 1733) p 15 (this hostile protestant pamphlet prints a translation of a long letter describing the English mission, sent by some unnamed member of a religious order to a cardinal in Rome. This letter is almost certainly authentic.)

13 Foley, H., Records [of the English Province of the Society of Jesus] (London 1877-83) 5 pp 161–2 Google Scholar.

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16 AAW Ep Var 6 no 55 bishop Giffard to Laurence Mayes 5 August 1717. And note the phrasing of AAW ‘A’ series 40 no 3 (an episcopal report to Rome), ‘non pauci e plebe quotidie ad Fidem convertuntur’ (my emphasis).

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19 Anstruther, Godfrey The Seminary Priests 3.1660-1715 (Great Wakering 1976) pp 81–4 Google Scholar; Gother, John [Mr Gother’s Spiritual] Works (London 1718) 1 p iv (memoir by Crathorn, W.)Google Scholar; Duffy, E. [‘A Rubb-up for old soares; Jesuits, Jansenists and the] English Secular Clergy’, JEH 28, 3 (July 1977) pp 291–317 Google Scholar at pp 291-4.

20 AAW Ep Var 1 no 21 John Betham to James Gordon 16 March 1704; Bossy, Community p 286.

21 It is quite wrong to talk, as Bossy does, of a ‘revival’ of the tradition of St François de Sales by Challoner. There were seven editions of the Introduction to the Devout Life published for English catholics between 1648 and 1686, and there is an almost monotonous stream of references to and praise of his works in the writings of secular clergy such as William Clifford (in the 1660s), Silvester Jenks, Christopher Tootell (in the 1690s) as well as Gother himself. Challoner stands at the end of this tradition, not its beginning.

22 Gother, Works 1 p 108.

23 Ibid 9 passim.

24 Bredvold, L. I., The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden (Ann Arbor 1956)Google Scholar; Gother, Works 6 p 141; 2 pp s-7, 24; AAW Ep Var 6 no 117 Giffard to Mayes 10 July 1719.

25 Gother, Works 2 pp 143-50. 289; 4 PP 143-7; 7 P 303; AAW Ep Var 10 no 103 Robert Witham to Laurence Mayes 9 April 1735.

26 Bossy, Community pp 272-7; Gother, Works 2 pp 102-4; Chandler, Samuel, [Tlie Notes of the Church ... a] Sermon ...[Preached at Salters Hall January 161734-5] (4 ed London 1735) pp 54–5 Google Scholar. Compare SPCK Minutes and Newman’s Memoranda 1 April 1713; SPCK Minute Book 16 fol 62.

27 Bossy, Community p 277. This reluctance has, I think, been overestimated, and there are many examples of proselytizing gentry in the early eighteenth century.

28 Diary of Richard Kay (Chetham Society 1965) pp 68, 85; the priest was George Whitaker, converted 1722, for whom see Anstruther, , Seminary Priests 4. 1716-1800 (1977) p 297 Google Scholar.

29 Stephens, Edward, A True Account of the Unaccountable Dealings of Some Roman Catholick Missioners of this Nation (London 1703)Google Scholar.

30 Kirk, John, Biographies of English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century (London 1909) p 184 Google Scholar; Anstruther, Seminary Priests 3 p 126; the Woodward fund, for example, founded in 1677 (but for which records survive only from the 1720s) had an income on $$$100 yearly, of which one third was for masses for the founder’s repose, one third for the poor of St Giles, and one third for the priest who tended them. Christopher Piggott benefited briefly from this fund (information from the ledger books of the old brotherhood of the secular clergy, kindly supplied by Miss Elisabeth Poyser, archivist of the archbishop of Westminster): Present State of Popery p 18.

31 Chandler, Sermon pp 54-5.

32 SPCK Minutes and Newman’s Memoranda 11 March 1712/3; ER 17 pp 35-8; Williams, Wiltshire pp 82-3, 191-2.

33 Duffy, ‘English Secular Clergy’ p 305; PRO MS SP 35 19/6a, ‘The Information of Mary the Wife of John Londichar ... 8 December 1719’.

34 AAW Ep Var 6 no 55 Giffard to Laurence Mayes 5 August 1717; Present State o j Popery pp 20-1.

35 CRS 14 pp 373-4.

36 The Letter Book of Lewis Sabran S.J. ed Geoffrey Holt SJ, CRS 62 (1971) pp 69, 75, 79. 92, 94, 103, in, 115, 161.

37 Anstruther, Seminary Priests 3 p 154.

38 Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem line 93; it is interesting to note that the commission for relieving poor proselytes, set up under royal patronage for the benefit of French converts from Catholicism in England fared much worse, the vast majority of its clients turning out to be ‘imposters and vagabonds . . . with no religious views’— Cowie, L. W., Henry Newman An American in London 1108-1743 (London 1956) pp 132-53Google Scholar.

39 SPCK Papers and Memorials 1713-1729 fols 40-2.

40 Anstruther, Seminary Priests 4 p 12$ (John Gunston); Present State of Popery p 19; Foley, Records 7 p 718.

41 [Anthony Horneck An Account of Mr ...] Edward Sclater’s Return [to the . . . Church of England] (London 1689) pp 22-3; Gother Works 2 pp 102-3.

42 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Penguin edition 1973) pp 239-40, 582-8; Bossy, Community pp 266-7; Aveling, The Handle and the Axe pp 299-300; SPCK, Papers and Memorials 1715-1729, fols 40-2; CRS 14 p 385; for the anxiety of the vicars apostolic to remedy these evils, AAW ‘A’ series 3 8 no 30, pastoral letter of bishop George Witham 19 November 1704; Ibid 40 no 9 circular letter of Robert Carnaby, vicar general for bishop Williams 1 February 1736/7.

43 CRS 14 pp 369-72, 378-80. Hervey worked in London 1730-4, and again in 1753-6; Anstruther Seminary Priests 4 pp 130-1.

44 CRS 14 pp 332-3; SPCK Minutes and Newman’s Memoranda 4 March 1712/13; Papers and Memorials 1711-1729 fols 146-7 Samuel Peploe to Henry Newman 11 May 1714; ER 17 pp 35-8; figures on secular clergy based on analysis of Anstruther, Seminary Priests, 2, 3, 4.

45 Edward Stephens The Misrepresenter truly Represented, OR A notable Metamorphosis . . . (privately printed, no place or date, but C1704/5) p 3.

46 CRS 14 p 315; no fewer than eleven of Hervey’s converts were reconciled while sick or dying.

47 Douglass), (John, Six letters from A—B—r to Father Sheldon . . . and the true Character of the Writer (London 1756) pp 75–84 Google Scholar; Bower, Archibald, The Second Part of Mr. Bower’s Answer to a Scurrilous Pamphlet . . . (London 1757) pp 27–9 Google Scholar.

48 SPCK Papers and Memorials 1715-1729 fols 40-2.

49 Account of Ann Ketelbey, passim; Archbishop Herring’s Visitation Returns, YAS (1928-31) 4 pp 191; AAW ‘A’ series 38 no 63 ‘Jane Wilson’s testimony’.

50 I take the Thomas Lewis mentioned by Hervey (CRS 14 p 371) to be the same convert discussed in HMC, Diary of the Earl of Egmont (London 1945) 1 p 228 Google Scholar.

51 The Protestant Family Piece p xviii; Edward Sclater’s Return pp 13, 19.

52 Present State of Popry p 18.

53 SPCK Papers and Memorials 1711-1729 fols 139-42 Samuel Peploc to Henry Newman 29 January 1713/14.

54 Duffy ‘Over the Wall’ p 22; CRS 14 p 374. (Both references to Osmotherley).